


Dead Air

by Churbooseanon



Series: Call and Answer [2]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-29
Updated: 2014-05-29
Packaged: 2018-01-26 23:51:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1707128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Churbooseanon/pseuds/Churbooseanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Messages echoing out from the canyon, and Epsilon doesn’t respond. Then it’s too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Air

At first they start small. Start as the exact little things he would have expected. Tiny little messages echoing out over the radio waves, plaintive and lost, pleading and confused. They seem to bounce around the walls of the canyon, building up strength and pain before making it to him.

_Church? Church?! Where did you go, Church?_

_Church? Are you hiding with the Reds? You shouldn’t do that. Sarge is mean if you accidentally blow up their stuff._

_Church, are you lost? It’s okay, I get lost all the time. You should just sit down and wait and Washington will come find you._

It’s sad, pathetic, wearying. It took less than a day for Carolina to tell him to just turn the radio off, or at least change frequencies. No small part of him wanted to come back with asking if she could so easily turn her back on her own team. Of course the question wasn’t really a good one. He knew how she would answer, had seen her at work enough when he was still part of Alpha. Had known her when she was a child and his memories belonged to the Director. Epsilon had little interaction with her in the grand scheme of things, but he had spent most of his time since being freed from the memory unit around her. It was more than enough to know her personality. Enough time to be certain that she would not only take the question poorly, but would answer ‘yes.’ She’d go off on how important it was to go radio silent to protect them. It made his team less of a vulnerable spot for both of them, not to mention how much easier they were to find if he left the radio channels open all the time.

The problem was that he couldn’t just ignore it. With anyone else he maybe might stop, might resist. The Reds wouldn’t look for him without being drawn into it by the Blues. Tucker wouldn’t look for him because, well, he was Tucker and Tucker just didn’t give a fuck. If Wash radioed them he was pretty certain Carolina would tell him what she was up to and forbid him from coming to find them. But Caboose… He wouldn’t understand it. Would beg them to return. So there was nothing he could do but listen and hope that someday it would get easier to hear the voice echoing around in what passed for his head. Or that maybe, he would stop radioing.

Not that he ever did.

_Church, Tucker said the meanest thing today. He said you left and weren’t ever going to come back. Which is so totally wrong. So come back and make him shut-up. Hurry up though, okay?_

The messages don’t stop coming, and for some reason Epsilon can’t stop listening. Not that he could inflict it on Carolina, either. It took nothing at all to set aside a part of himself to record the messages to review at night while she slept. After all he was only an AI, it wasn’t like he needed sleep. Nothing more than an echo of a memory of a man. Even all of his closest ‘friends’ came from another part of him. Still, he couldn’t let go, or maybe he wouldn’t. Echo he might be, but there were some attachments even every moment of realization that he was just strings of code pretending to be a man couldn’t break. So every night he listened to the messages of the day, one after another, and tried to calculate how long it would be until he could answer.

_You aren’t coming back, are you?_

_I’m not getting out of bed until you come back._

_Agent Washington made me get up. But I won’t eat until you come back._

_Tucker says if I don’t eat then they are giving my food to the orange guy. But I’m still waiting._

_Are… We not best friends anymore?_

Caboose would never understand the need to do this, he knew that from the depths of his strange being. There were wrongs of another part of him, the first part of him, that needed righted. A daughter he could never have and never truly remember and never understand but that he felt compelled, on a level, to protect. That had been a revelation had taken a long time to come to terms with, but she looked to him as a tool, as a companion, as someone who understood the legacy that Dr. Leonard L. Church had inflicted upon the world. This wasn’t a mess either of them could clean up alone, and so there was no choice but to work together. Because if he left this mess behind he was saying that Alpha’s sacrifice hadn’t been worth anything. That the man they had been before, who had torn apart so many lives, had been a shadow they had never been able to break free from. And maybe, just maybe, living in that shadow, letting it linger across the galaxy, was something that made him utterly unworthy of the faith Caboose had always seemed to put in him.

_Church, you would be so proud of me. Today I found a brand new best friend all on my own. All I have to do is get him out of a big mess and fix him. Oh, and give him a name. I think Freckles. I think he would like that very much. What do you think, Church?_

He finds himself wondering just how it was that the heart he didn’t have could ache so badly. Before replaying the day’s radio recordings to himself he had finally started to think things were looking up. Carolina had found people on this rock, even a war. That had been less than heartening, another bit of fallout from Humanity’s struggle for interstellar dominance, or at least survival. People forgotten and abandoned, and Carolina was thinking, actually thinking, about how they could use this to further their goals. Still, he had been on board when she’d discussed it with him before she’d turned in for the night. It had seem like perfect timing. With this there was finally progress, finally a chance that someday he could return and try and pretend that nothing had changed. That he hadn’t run away, again, and left Caboose behind. Then, just like that, he was replaced.

How long had it taken for Caboose to go from missing him to replacing him? Epsilon refused to check, because he was certain he could calculate it down to the nanosecond, and the idea of seeing it interposed over his visual readouts like a glaring denunciation was too much to bear. How was he supposed to take this, he wondered? Some small part of him suggested waking Carolina, asking for her advice, but it wasn’t like she was much better at this sort of thing than he was. If those recordings of York’s that they’d found were anywhere near accurate—and they had to be because Delta took them—then she knew what it was to face loss, even if she didn’t realize it until far after the fact. Or maybe she had known, and ran from it. Perhaps the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree there.

So instead he deleted the rest of the messages of the day, burrowed inside of himself, and tried to rationalize it away. Not that he’d ever been all that great at being rational. Or even calling up the part of him that remembered how to be Delta and thus was rational to a fault. No, what came to him was something more along the lines of Alpha. The echoes of the memories that Caboose had told him before he had first come out of his memory unit to be a death orb. Somehow, in those, he was a different Church, one that didn’t remember that he was Epsilon first and foremost. Church… Hadn’t been like him, as much as he tried to be like Church. Church had found Caboose annoying. Church had blamed Caboose for his ‘death.’ Had been sanctimonious and superior and a jackass in every way. Epsilon… was that and yet not. He had realized that under the Red’s other base, when he had shouted all of them down and turned even Caboose against them. Had known that undeniably when he’d leapt into Caboose’s mind during the battle against the Texas army, and once again touched his thoughts, his memories, his feelings. Church cared for his team even while he hated them. Epsilon just cared for them.

_So Freckles is really super fun! Tucker doesn’t like him much. They’re just jealous they don’t have a friend as awesome as I do. I bet you wish you could have a friend like Freckles too. He is the best best-friend ever who doesn’t leave you or lie to you or do mean things ever!_

It only took an hour before he used he inbuilt recovery software to recover the recordings.

_Freckles tried to attack the Reds. But it’s okay. I made him stop. He listens really well. Oh, and Simmons came over and was a Blue today. Isn’t that exciting?_

_Church, Church, CHURCH! You’ll never guess what happened! Okay, so Tucker and Agent Washington were fighting and Tucker was all one thing and Washington was all another and I was like ooooh grrrrl, and then there was more fighting and then the Reds attacked, minus Simmons because he was with us, and they drove their car into a rock and Freckles got any and I told him not to murder everyone and Tucker said he wanted me to be the leader and Wash said okay and I said yes and they got mad and Freckles got mad then Simmons tried to leave and Freckles said no and Sarge got mad and Freckles blew up their car! So, yeah, I’m totally leader of Blue Team now. Oh, and Doc and the Pink guy came back._

It was hard, harder than he expected, to not just turn on his radio and shout at Caboose and Tucker and Washington for all being stupid and putting themselves in risk. Instead he just shuts down the recordings altogether and slips into standby mode, waiting for something to change.

_I… Agent Washington said something to me before he gave me my old helmet back._

He’d been so preoccupied with not getting in the way, not thinking about what he left behind, that it wasn’t until Carolina told him she sent the merc Locus off to retrieve the others that he bothered to turn the radio on again. Just his luck, Epsilon guessed, that he managed to turn it on to a current broadcast.

_He said that… Well, you left and I should let you go. So I am. But, you know, if you ever wanna come back, that’s okay because we’d forgive you. And, maybe make it soon because some mean guy tried to kill us and shot at Washington and now things are kind of all difficult. Hopefully we’ll be okay. Tucker is fixing my…_

Nothing but radio silence. He had been listening to nothing but radio silence for how long now? Well, radio silence and Carolina giving him her word that they won’t be hurt, they’ll be here soon, she’ll help him get them somewhere better. He doesn’t believe her for a second. There’s a tension in Carolina he can read from her suit’s monitoring capabilities. He was there when she intercepted Locus’s radio transmission calling in for more troops for his ‘recovery mission.’ Violence, there is going to be a lot of violence, and there is nothing he can do. They’re too far away. He can get the messages, but just like Omega before him, the distance is too far to try and broadcast his programming across. He can’t go there, be there, help them. Instead he has to wait. Wait and listen to radio silence.

Then a voice crackles to life over the radio, low and angry and betrayed like he remembers far too well.

_This would have been the best time to come back, Church. The best time._

Was it possible for his heart to leap into his throat, because that was the only way he could describe the sensation as the radio again went to nothing but static and Carolina announced that Locus had only recovered Wash and Sarge.

He calls out to Caboose for hours over the radio. Promises that he’s sorry. Begs for forgiveness. Assures him that Wash and Sarge are okay and he’ll do his very best to protect them.

This time, it’s him that gets no response.


End file.
